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Jesus was telling a story. Neither of these figures are supposed to be real people, but they do represent a caricature of real people.
The imagined rich man represents those who believe they do not need God. They have figured out how the world works, they are savvy in their investments and decisions, and they have done well by all measures the world puts out. In Jesus’ time an indicator of that was purple cloth, sumptuous feasts, households full of servants, and a gated entryway. The imagined man likely worked hard, and he and most people around him felt he deserved his wealth and the comfort that went with it. He perhaps turned up at his place of worship and thanked God for all of his blessings—but even in saying that prayer, he credited his own know-how as being the true source of those riches. He was, perhaps, generous in charitable giving. But the reality was, with all that wealth and success, he did not need God. God was a cultural fixture, as evident in his reality as air, but nowhere in his life could he think of needing God. He was doing too well. He was comfortable. He was rich! As with him, if we’re truthful, few of us ever really want to need God, either. To need God risks looking like the other character in this story, a man whom Jesus curiously named as Lazarus.
Lazarus is the most pitiable of human beings. He reminds anyone who would have seen him of the fragility of human life and the possibility of a body racked by pestilence and disease. He sits looking out of feverish eyes at a world that has condemned him to fester and rot in his own waste, his sores licked by unclean dogs. Lazarus can point to no human success of his own. Purple cloth is off his radar screen, as far from him as a Ferrari to most of us. To the rich man, he may look like someone who made wrong choices in life and wound up there: and maybe Lazarus did make poor choices. But here’s the thing: Jesus never tells us! Jesus never, ever, heaps blame upon Lazarus for his position. Nor does he praise or even condemn the rich man for his economic savvy. No judgement is made good or ill upon how they arrived at their relative states. All that Jesus does is point out that a chasm exists between both of them, and that chasm is not simply wealth nor lack of it: the chasm is between one who believes he does not need God—and despite all of his sumptuous wealth, the rich man is inevitably the one Jesus probably wanted us to most identify with even if we’re of modest means—and one who does need God. Lazarus needs God, for no-one else nor nothing else in the world is going to help him. Lazarus is aware of that becomes he possess nothing, neither wealth nor health, to delude him into thinking he’s self-sustaining. The rich man, because of his material success, is not. He has determined his own destiny. This clouds his ability to see the world as God does, to feel he needs God.
And thus, when they both die, the reality of their situation sets in. The one who knew he needed God was there, with God, with Moses and the prophets. And the chasm between them, now fixed, separated him from the one who did not need God: and his life was a burning hellfire where no amount of purple cloth could assuage his thirst. The image is startling not so much because it’s hell as we cartoonishly imagine it, but rather it is an indication of what life is really like without God. He pleaded with Moses to send Lazarus down to dip his finger in water. Denied that, he asked for Lazarus to be resurrected and tell his own family that the law and the prophets—all the things that directed people to God and not their own agency—was true! But Moses denied that, too. For if they would not listen to the law and the prophets, what would compel them to listen to a resurrected human being? We who hear this story today, of course, know that people did listen to the story of resurrection: it’s why we’re here.
The parable is extreme. Few of us are extravagantly wealthy. Few of us are moaning in agony outside of the gates of wealthy people’s homes. All of us can imagine this, though, because these extremes do exist in the world as we know it. But Jesus knew that the vast majority of his audience were like us. He wanted us to realise that to our detriment we believe that our wealth is earned solely by our own hand and efforts, that it is, solely, ours. It’s not. It’s all part of a the fabric of society and creation in which we exist. And the more we see our own agency alone as what secures it for us, the less we think we need God. And indeed, we live in a society and time where plenty of good people—many of whom we like and love—see no need for God. Our modern, secular society has made it seem that we no longer need the pretence of a God.
But the danger in such a world is that, in misfortune and calamity, we can, and often do, see it as falling on someone because of their own mistakes. It becomes their fault that something happened, and we search through all of the world as if pathologists seeking an answer for why something happened, satisfied only with a logical explanation. And this works until we realise how inexplicable the world is, how promiscuous wealth can be, and how fickle our mastery of the world truly is. This applies to individuals as well as society at large. Inexplicable things throw us off-course. Misery does happen, through no fault of our own or really without cause.
The answer, though, is not to make oneself miserable in order to become dependent upon God. We all need not become like Lazarus. The answer is to, in humility, let go of the belief that we’re in charge of everything that happens. Let go of the need to control everything. Let go of our guilt, believing everything bad that happens is our fault. Let go of the belief that all we earn is ours. And let go of the belief that each person is master of their own destiny, and that we move through the world solely in terms of resources. Of course people need resources to get by: the body needs a shelter and churches today need money. But the resources are ultimately God’s, and our names being attached to them means that we are stewards of them but for a short while. But they need not define us. We need God.
This isn’t something that we can do with the right statements. It’s something we do in how we live. The extremes of Jesus’ parable portrays what a world that doesn’t think it needs God would look like, where a chasm divides people with resources from people without them, a chasm so uncrossable that it might as well be a different reality. In saying weneed God, we are listening to the law and the prophets. We are prioritising the people Jesus prioritised: more than anyone else, Jesus raised up the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant as the three we should most work alongside.
It wasn’t just service toward people that Jesus was emphasising if we recognise we need God and therefore needthe law and the prophets. We can get so wrapped up in serving and doing for so-called ‘others’ that we can miss the point that, had the rich man gotten it, would have meant Lazarus would never have been so in pain: to be in relationship with one another. We cannot know God without knowing one another. To journey alongside anyone, including those most in need of one another, is to be in relationship with them. To hear their stories. To share your own. To sit still with someone, for no other purpose than to be still with them. For someone to know they are heard and loved, and for you to know that you are heard and loved. Our faith is not one of works and service and endless social justice campaigns, but of listening and hearing, praying and realising that we are not our own: we belong to God. We are not masters of our own destiny: we rely on God’s grace. This gives us enough humility to not rely on our wealth to get through the world, but God, apprehended as best we can through our relationships, our stories, our radical curiosity about the world and one another.
I said that the church can get stuck in the trap of the rich man, and we can: we can think that our life is about our resources; that the success of our church is about how many young people we have, or what good works we have done, or how much is in our bank account, which justice campaigns we’ve signed up for, and how ‘hip’ our worship service is. Some of this might be an effect of our congregational life, but our church cannot be about that. Success in church has never been that. Church is where we encounter the living, loving God, an encounter that pulls us out of the deterministic and narrow way of looking at the world that condemns us to a hell where our own actions alone determine our fate. Church and the life of faith are where we are invited by a preacher to think outside of ourselves; to belt out of songs in beautiful music, to dwell in relationships with other children of God gathered in worship, to be still and know that God is God . . . so that we encounter something of the transcendent God outside our understanding and ability to control it. A healthy church is where we are in relationship with something impossible, a transcendent God that we cannot control and can only respond to in awe and wonder, to sit still for a time.
Jesus spoke to us from the middle of the chasm that divided his two imaginary people. He knew that most of us live in the middle of that, too. But he also knew the temptation that nips at our heels is to hew toward being the rich man, toward a hellish self-sufficiency. Perhaps we choose it because it feels safe to be surrounded by so many reasons. Perhaps we justify it by saying that we’d never become so self-absorbed, so Scrooge-like, as to allow something as awful as what happened to Lazarus to happen. But to choose to live in such a way is to risk believing that we do not need God, and that our resources are ours alone. It’s a hellish existence because then everything becomes up to us: and who can bear such a burden? Thanks be to God, we live in the middle of this chasm. To live in that chasm is to live with a tension: on one hand of being still and being reminded, often joyfully, that we need God; and on the other, of the action needed to forge the relationships with people that remind us of God and the imago dei, the image of God, that resides in each person living. This tension reminds us that we are never our own, and to be joyful for that. It reminds us to share what we have so that the extremes of wealth divides, as seen in Lazarus and the rich man, don’t happen. And above all, sisters and brothers, remember this: let us never succumb entirely to the thinking that the impossible cannot happen, for that is the lesson of the resurrection. May our lives be lived in response to it so that we can be open to the encounter of God.